Stop and Look – Enguerrand Quarton: The Avignon Pietà

This powerful picture is famous in France for exemplifying the emergence of a French school of painting, but it’s surprisingly little known in Britain.

It came to light as recently as 1904, and for a long time its author was unidentified. It has now been attributed to Quarton (or Charonton) with fair confidence, a painter from northern France who moved to Avignon and spent his life there. This is one of a handful of paintings that he created for the Carthusian church in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, a little hill-town across the river Rhône from the city of Avignon itself.

It is a work that defies categorisation: a self-evident masterpiece, presenting a well-known, emotionally weighty subject with bold and uncompromising directness. At first sight, it seems to be closely connected with the Flemish works of Rogier van der Weyden from the same period, particularly his Pietà (found in the Prado in Madrid). On deeper inspection, however, Quarton’s painting is surprisingly independent of the tradition that Rogier represents.

It is, to start with, much bleaker, couched in an austere aesthetic that reflects the self-denying rule of the Carthusian order of monks. The distant view of Jerusalem is schematic, a mere nod to the idea that we are witnessing an actual event in a real place. There is no lush landscape, the sky is a plain gold background. This is a reminder that Avignon, seat of the schismatic Popes in the previous century, had been a centre to which several Italian artists were drawn. Among these Simone Martini from Siena, where gold grounds were the norm, was particularly influential. He is thought to have introduced the technique of punching designs and lettering into the gold, as can be seen in his Annunciation.

The punching technique is used in the Avignon Pietà to create haloes against the gold sky that carry inscriptions identifying the participants in the scene, their psychology is presented starkly in terms of emotional type: the Virgin Mother, her hands joined in prayer, devastated by the loss of her son at the hands of torturers; John the Evangelist, “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, intently engaged in the spiritual meaning of the experience; and Mary Magdalen, the repentant sinner, still wearing her luxuriously brocaded mantle.

These are the traditional figures in a Pietà, though sometimes others are included. Here, only the praying priest at the left is an additional character. He is likely the individual responsible for the commission, and presumably a canon or other dignitary of the collegiate church. It was usual at the time to include a lifelike portrait of the “patron”, who hoped to gain a heavenly reward by his creative generosity.

At the centre of the composition is the dead Christ, his body almost shockingly inert and angular as it lies awkwardly across the Virgin’s lap. Pietàs like this were intended as objects of devout and penitent contemplation, and the horrors of the Crucifixion were often dwelt on in unpleasant detail. Here, the artist conveys the torment and the finality of death with expressive restraint.

Beneath the picture is inscribed a quotation from the book of Lamentations in St Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate): “All ye who pass by, behold and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”  In presenting us with one of the most poignant themes of Christian art, the Avignon Pietà strips away all pictorial distractions and focuses remorselessly on the universal human emotions of pity and sorrow.